My curiosity about my leukocytes started before the pandemic. I was motivated by the oldest and most basic grief we experience: the loss of love. But the lessons from my heartache and the emerging neurogenomics of loneliness have much to offer our strange moment in time.
Steve was always ready to grab a shield off the wall and hunker down. He was never dishonest about it. “Not my thing,” he wrote from time to time about some artist I’d covered that didn’t connect for him. “But I admire the passion.”
Please consider for just a moment how much more elegant that response is than the contemporary cultural default of clearly defined positive and negative spaces. We live in binary times with the things we like and hate. Steve saw what happened to the light when it shot through the prism. He had preferences — as we all do. But a guy who helped airplanes converge through narrowing passages to a common point always saw something more like the sky in art — boundless possibilities.
When you're an established author, people see your articles and books come out, they hear about your awards and see you on TV, but what they didn't see — literally, because the audiences were that small — is you earning your stripes first in the world of unpaid and underpaid art events. Creative writing students know that grind. It goes with submitting your work again and again after thousands of rejections from journals with tiny audiences, reading pages of feedback from people who don't get your work and sticking it out at wild mixers.
Now that I've published a few books and hundreds of articles, I'd like to celebrate by sharing some readings from hell. This is my toast to the MFA students out there, especially those coming out of virtual classrooms to engage with the public for the first time. Keep submitting your work. Keep doing the readings. You'll keep getting better. And I promise you, it will pay off.
Want to finish reading an article? You can, but only if you subscribe for just $1 for 3 months, which becomes $11.99 a month thereafter, and into perpetuity, until your credit card expires. Even if it's after you do.
I have a strong, even personal interest in paying journalists fairly. But the cost most people have to pay these days if they want to try to stay informed and enrich their minds with a range of opinions is pretty steep.
So masterly is Manguso at making beauty of boring old daily pain that when more dramatic plot turns arrive — suicides, teen pregnancies — they almost seem superfluous, visitations from an after-school special. The book is strong enough as a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. The effect is cumulative, and this novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.
Eating keeps us alive, of course, but one theme of Saladino’s deeply humanist book is how many of the things we consume can’t survive without us. Heirloom vegetables and grains, like the O-Higu soybean that once grew across Okinawa, will be unknown if we stop planting them. Livestock breeds like the Middle White pig, also known as the London Porker in the days when it was “ pig of choice,” will die out if we stop raising them. The Georgian wines fermented by wild yeasts in clay pots called qvevri that were around before wine barrels will dry up if we stop drinking them.
one of these days, and if it is I’ll swim,
bobbing up and down over probably,
it will be summer and my god I’ll say hello
to people who don’t live in my house,